Color: Black
Minimum SCL: 8
Training Package Recommend: I&I, Death Squad
Contact: Carlie Vershone, Karma Liaison, Dept of Health and Welfare
Consolidated Pay: 750 c per Op, squads only
Coverage: Station Analysis
Summary: Locate and reacquire research scientist from Dark Night in Downtown Sector. Reacquire notes and destroy facility. Terminate all Dark Night sympathizers encountered at facility. Bonus available, sponsorship possible.
If you are planning on running this BPN with your squad, make the decision a couple of BPNs prior and run the following vignettes:
Vignette #1: Pick the Op with the lowest Housing rank and mention to him/her that lately the rats have been particularly bad and that he has found more than one dead in the middle of his floor. If the Op takes more than a cursory interest in the rats, allow him to be able to piece together that they are coming from the apartment next door. If he investigates, he will find a family of four, dead in their apartments with odd lesions and a few bite marks from the rats. A good half dozen rat corpses keep them company. If not, then have them being carried out of the apartment as he walks by.
Vignette #2: Pick the Op with the most club oriented lifestyle and have the girl/guy they are dancing with one night drop dead on the dance floor with convulsions, bloody foam at the mouth, and small red blisters. The Op will probably look into it, and will eventually find the ME report, indicating that the deceased died of internal pulmonary hemorrhaging with a list of four or five possible causes including drug overdose.
"Hey baby, you need a date?"
When the Ops have finished up a BPN, have a nice limo cruise on up and shadow the squad for a block or two. The limo will then pull ahead and stop. The door will open and a large Stormer in a dark tailored suit will step out and wait for the squad. Hopefully they won’t take this as a bad sign and start shooting (adjust for your players if necessary). When the squad gets parallel to the limo, the Stormer will step in front of them, blocking the sidewalk, and gesture to the lime.
Inside is Carlie Vershone, a very small, pretty red head with hazel eyes in the equivalent of a Vera Wang. She will catch one of the Ops eyes, wink, and then pout expressively. "I thought we had a date tonight, honey," she’ll whine. "Are you going to work all night?" She’ll then turn serious and say "Wipe your feet and get in. Time is money in my business."
At this point, the Stormer will hold out an envelope to the most corporate looking squad member. Inside is a small stack of 100 uni notes and enough passes to the next premier Contract Circuit event for the squad and dates.
"That’s just to listen to the offer," says Carlie.
Once everyone is inside the limo, Carlie will offer them drinks from the extensive bar and hand out Non Disclosure Agreements. Provided everyone signs (she won’t accept a squad signature) she will then lean back into the seat, sip some champagne, and inform the squad, "OK, kids, this one’s a black. But don’t let that scare you. Recent inquiries indicate that you have the skills to get the job done, otherwise we wouldn’t have approached you. Succeed, and my department will take a personal interest in your continued success. Fail, well, you won’t, so let’s not dwell on it."
She will then pass out thin dossiers which explain the mission in more detail.
Dr. Lazlo Ezrael Biggs disappeared from his home several months ago. Shortly after the disappearance his lab was broken into and all of his research notes were stolen. Recent intelligence indicates that he is being held captive by Dark Night agents in a research facility in Sector 16859 Lower Downtown.
Dr. Biggs was involved in researching a bio-agent employed by Thresher troops on the war world Mercury Park in an attempt to develop a cure and then a vaccine. It is known that Dr. Biggs had succeeded in isolating the bio-agent’s origins, its original vector, and its facilitated vector. It is believed and feared that he is currently being forced to replicate both the agent and its facilitated vector for use by Dark Night. SLA Industries needs Dr. Biggs safely removed from the facility with as much of his notes as possible. The remainder need to be destroyed as well as the facility if possible.
The dossier will indicate that Dr. Biggs made a report to his department head prior to his disappearance. In it, he indicates that the original vector was parasites commonly found on rats and the facilitated vector to be air borne particles. The report also indicates that the facilitated vector is characterized by advanced pulmonary trauma and bronchitis like symptoms. At the end of the report it will list the following [contR fV94% cV56% fatalR fV83%, cV68% nontreat, serum promising; 67% in model].
Note: If you need to spell it out more for your players, you may list more symptoms similar to the vignettes. The line at the end of the report can read [contagion rate – facilitated vector 94%, common vector 56%; fatality rate – facilitated vector 83%, common vector 68%, no known treatment, serum promising with 67% positive patient response in models]. Or make the paramedic roll.
At this point, your players should put two and two together and come up with five. With a little healthy paranoia, a least two of your players should be wondering if they are going to die of some bizarre disease. If you think they need a little push in the right direction, you can have Carlie display symptoms. If anyone thinks to ask about incubation periods or how close to a cure Dr. Biggs was; give them two to four weeks.
How you want to play this out is up to you and the style of your players. If you want them to have to do some investigation to find the facility, fine. Otherwise, have its exact location noted in the dossier.
Several clues can be used to determine the location of the facility. First off, a quick trip to the sector morgue or hospital facility should provide enough locations of mysterious deaths due to disease to triangulate the location. If anyone digs a bit into the mysterious deaths, they will notice that about 2/3 of them are Stormers. If they actually get the medical records on these individuals, have it note the general pulmonary trauma and blood seepage in the lungs, at the end should be a little note from the coroner that the brains exhibit evidence of a degenerative disease and low levels of dopamine. If the Ops dig further into the victims’ medical records they will discover that half have the notation "Parks Syndrome". Likewise, a check of the sector power grid will turn up several "hot points" of power usage. Lastly, interrogation of local Dark Night agents or gang members, while very dangerous, could yield the location. If the latter is used, be sure to note that while Dark Night is aware of the facility, they will seem somewhat surprised for it to be considered "theirs".
Once located, the facility will be an abandoned shoe factory. Careful investigation will lead to the discovery that the service area has an entrance to a lower floor, which is cluttered with discarded machinery rusting alongside piles of scrap. Makeshift corridors run in all directions. Exploration into the labyrinth will yield the presence of a light in the far corner of the building. Observant Ops may notice that mixed into the machinery are several Tek Trex droids in various states, some with high top sneakers on them.
At the far corner a bare bulb illuminates a small 2x2 meter section of the factory with a trap door in the floor and what appears to be two boarded up windows. If the Ops did a careful survey of the building prior to entry, give them a chance to realize that there should be no windows at this section of the building. A careful survey of the area will also allow the Ops to notice that there are several alarms set on this area. A motion sensor on either wall, a thermo sensor over the trap door, and two seismic sensors set in the floor near the machinery labyrinth. If any of these sensors are tripped, they will have a good 10 minutes before anything happens. There is also an alarm on the trap door.
The trap door is, well, a trap. Opening the trap door reveals a long (5 meters) unlighted shaft with a metal ladder embedded into the wall. At the bottom appears to be another tunnel or a small room. It is hoped by the trap setters that Ops will go down the shaft and find an empty room, at which point they will then go back up the shaft.
If any of the alarms are set off, ten minutes later 6 Tek Trex droids will show up (in their nifty sneakers) and begin to hose down targets. They are timed to allow intruders time to go down the shaft, so that the droids can unload on them coming back up.
The real entrance is behind one of the boarded up "windows" and includes a fairly tough series of electronic and manual locks. It opens on a small, well lit corridor with several doors. Each door leads to one of the following rooms: a bedroom that is a bit posh, better than most Uptown apartments, a large bath area complete with shower, steam room, and Jacuzzi pool, a kitchen area fit for standard cooking, but with a very large refrigerator and freezer, and lastly, at the back, the lab.
Dr. Biggs is in the lab, working on several experiments at once with various bio-medical pieces of equipment doing bio-medical things like spinning, bubbling, gelling, and whirring away. Several pieces have warning stickers indicating that standing too close them would be hazardous to your health due to nuclear, acid, base, bio-hazard, temperature, or just plain crankiness. Mixed with these are a plethora of glass tubes, beakers, decanters, recanters, incanters, and dishes; some of a very nice china pattern that would go lovely with the duvet and bed skirt combo found in the bedroom. To one side are two dissection tables that are currently occupied with a Stormer and a human in mid-dissection. If the Ops are paying attention or make a good Detect roll, they may notice that one machine has several blinking red lights on them that are labeled: se, sd, sa1, sa2, td, md, and mc [service entrance, storage door, storage area 1, storage area 2, trap door, main door, and main corridor].
Dr. Biggs will appear to be mildly surprised at the Ops appearance (though he isn’t). When the Ops explain that they are from SLA and are here to rescue him, he will express surprise that SLA is interested in his research and will mumble something about Mr. Slayer never being interested before. He will happily comply with packing up his lab and will produce containers to pack up all the computer equipment, special containers for the samples, and more containers for the miscellaneous equipment. It will take about 3.5 hours to pack everything, especially since Dr. Biggs seems to be very unsteady; his hands tremble, his gate is shaky and tends to sway a little. When he is done there will be 14 containers. Add an hour and 3 more containers if he is allowed to pack his bedroom. He does have a convenient handcart that will hold 8 of the containers, but the rest will have to be carried.
At all times, Dr. Biggs will be very helpful and accommodating, though slightly hyper and appearing slightly drunk.
As the Ops leave the lab area, hopefully loaded down with semi-fragile containers that Dr. Biggs will constantly remind them to be careful with, and make their way down the corridors of junk will be beset by a few more Tek Trex druids (feel free to use different types). They should have to shoot through about a dozen in teams of two and three (feel free to modify for your Ops).
If they make it through all the little ambushes, there is a team of five Dark Night agents (including a couple of snipers) set up on the service entrance to add a little more pain and woe.
Not one of the three Ops teams so far have asked Dr. Biggs if he wants to be rescued. The answer is no, he’d rather not. He is busy researching a mysterious disease that seems to effect a portion of the populace, including himself, in the hopes of finding a cure, or at least a therapy. Mr. Slayer doesn’t want Dr. Biggs’ research to become well known as the disease has a higher rate of incidence in Stormers, implying that there may be something wrong with them on a genetic level. He has been using his doctor’s credentials to access medical records and find individuals with the disease and used them as test patients for his experiments. Oh, by the way, the pulmonary trauma and internal bleeding is a side effect of some of the treatments he’s been testing. Neither the treatments nor the disease itself are contagious; the treatment has to be injected and the disease (say Parkinson’s Disease) is genetic in origins. Just bear in mind that Karma does not want any hint of a genetic disease effecting Stormers.
So, the devious bastard will go along willingly with the Ops, forgetting to deactivate the Tek Trex droids. He will offer to provide medical treatment to the Ops if any get wounded, at which point he will cause more damage, then stop the bleeding, only to have the bleeding start again later. Or he might inject a drug that doesn’t help the Op so much. If he can, he will inject one of his treatments into an Op. When the first set of Tek Trex droids hit, he will ask for a gun. If he is given one, he will make some ineffectual pot shots once in awhile, giving the impression he can’t shot. However, he is proficient (Rank 4) and he will calmly shoot any Op that he is left alone with, provided he can do so without giving away his cover. There are also a couple of spots where he can accidentally or secretly cause some of the junk piles to fall onto the Ops.
Lastly, he has paid a local Dark Night cell to provide some protection. It is this cell that has shown up to ambush the squad. During which Dr. Biggs will continue his charade.
Dr. Bigg’s plan is to soften the Ops so badly (well, being killed earlier is okay) that when they load him on whatever transport they have brought, it should be fairly easy for him to take them out when their guard is down, steal their vehicle, and escape to another lab set-up. Either way, once he gets to the transport, he will have to go all out, as he does not want to be captured by SLA Industries.
Should he manage to inject his treatment into an Op, they must make a Phys roll two rounds later. If they succeed, then the treatment has no effect. Failure, and they lose a Phys point. Continue in this vein every 5 rounds or so. If they succeed after a failure, then the treatment has been rejected, at which point failure does not cause a lose of Phys and success will bring back a Phys. Multiple failures will eventually drain away all their Phys, at which point, well, they die.
Victory?
Should the Ops manage to survive and get Dr. Biggs to their drop point, they will get a hefty bonus and maybe a small sponsorship from Karma.
Should the Ops manage to survive, kill Dr. Biggs, and deliver his notes and samples to the drop point, they will get a nice bonus.
If the Ops manage to survive, but kill Dr. Biggs and destroy his notes and samples, they will be considered adequate by Karma, and paid.
If the Ops manage to survive, but lose Dr. Biggs or his notes and samples, Karma will consider it a failure, and pay half to nothing.
If the Ops die, but kill Dr. Biggs and destroy his notes and samples, Karma will pay their next of kin and Third Eye may note their passing.
If the Ops die and Dr. Biggs escapes with his notes and samples, well, then it doesn’t really matter. Unless one of the Ops have LAD, in which case, said Op should be considered owned by Karma.